Cloudify 4.5 has arrived! Cloud Native Orchestration from Network Core to Edge

We’re excited to announce our latest version of Cloudify – 4.5! This release comes with quite a few features, integrations, and improvements that focus on intent-based networking and closed-loop orchestration for cloud native and multi-cloud production deployments.

With this latest release of Cloudify, organizations can manage their networks from the core to the edge. Version 4.5 introduces new continuous deployment updates and pluggable closed-loop automation to support true intent-based orchestration. Gartner says that intent-based networking is the next big thing on the horizon, as it “helps to plan, design and implement/operate networks that can improve network availability and agility”.

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So what’s new in Cloudify 4.5? Check out the featured updates.

Pluggable and agentless monitoring

Cloudify 4.5 includes the ability to plugin your current logging and monitoring tools for full, closed-loop orchestration. This version also comes with out of the box Nagios integration to enable agentless monitoring by tracking SNMP events and traps, simplifying the monitoring of existing network appliances that do not support agent-based monitoring.

Deployment wizard

The Deployment Wizard is a great tool within Cloudify Console (UI) that assists users with blueprint deployments by breaking up a deployment into simple steps and enabling users to get a running deployment quickly and efficiently.

Manager Security

In order to ensure your credentials are kept safe, we have enforced encryption of all external and internal communication to and from the manager as well as for the secret store. We also added new Kerberos authentication to ensure maximum isolation of every execution.

Actionable events

We added a pluggable framework enabling users to add hooks on workflows, with an out-of-the-box implementation of SNMP traps for workflow-related events. For example, if a user wants an email notification upon a failed workflow, simply configure that and any time that workflow event occurs, an email will be sent to the user.

Add networks post install

Now users have the ability to add new networks to a running manager using the cfy_manager add-networks command. Premium users can also add networks to a Cloudify Manager cluster.

Workflow Queues

One of the great new features we have added is the ability to queue a workflow by adding the --queue flag to an execution cfy executions start <workflow>. A queued execution starts as soon as it can and users can cancel queued executions.
An execution will be queued in the following cases:

• Snapshot creation execution while there are running executions
• Executing a workflow while a snapshot is running or queued
• Executing a workflow while there are running executions for the same deployment (if not forced)

External PostgreSQL option

Every Cloudify Manager installation requires a PostgreSQL database to store its required data such as blueprints, deployment, tenants, and more. By default, Cloudify Manager is installed in an all-in-one topology, however, as part of Cloudify’s progression towards a microservices architecture, users can select to use an existing PostgreSQL external database, or use Cloudify’s PostgreSQL package and installation methods.

Cloud native integrations

We have made some major strides in building pluggable networking support for popular Kubernetes networking projects such as Flannel, Calico, and Weave. We also added support for bare-metal or libvirt infrastructure on top of the most popular clouds, as well as federation for edge and low-latency geographical distribution.

Networking integrations

We have some new integrations that are available and being worked on at the moment.
New Cloudify integrations for popular network services:

• Oracle SBC Plugin
• Broadsoft Plugin
• Multi-cloud Swift3 Plugin
• Benu Networks Plugin
• Juniper Contrail Plugin
• iDirect OSS/BSS Integration
• Netnumber TITAN VNFM using Ansible & Execution plugins
• Nuage SD-WAN Integration

Stay tuned as we ready for the next release, 4.5.5 in the upcoming weeks with some important improvements and fixes.